How to Collect Customer Feedback & What to Do With It.

 As a marketer, one of the biggest challenges is understanding what it is my audience wants.

• What are they are looking for?
• What do they need?
• How can I help them?
• The problem is, these questions aren’t always easy to answer.

Humans are complicated and if I’m being honest, we don’t spend enough time actually paying attention to their needs.In fact, a study from Janrain reported only 5.8% of users felt digital ads understood their needs.To cut through the noise and reach our customers, we have to pay attention to what they want – and it starts with feedback. Customer feedback is an amazing asset to have in our toolbox. It gives us real insights into how our customers feel and what they want.It shows us what we are doing right, how we can improve, and is integral to brand messaging and marketing.

1.Use Polls

Polls can be an effective way of seeking feedback due to their user-friendliness. You can conduct polls on your website, via newsletter, or through emails. Tools such as Polldaddy and SurveyMonkey are available for this purpose. You can also conduct polling through social media websites.

Polls play an important role in identifying trends which can help you make business decisions. For example, before a holiday season, a poll can reveal trends on what customers are likely to buy, which helps in stocking.

2. Live Customer Q&As

A few months ago, a software suite we use was getting ready to roll out a new product. Before they did, however, they held live Q&As with power users.

This allowed the company to get real-time feedback from the people who would actually be using the product.

It also allowed them to see what features were missing, what bugs were still out there, and most importantly, how their audience would actually use it.

3. Call on Customer Support

If you’ve gone to a marketing conference in the past 10 years there was at least one person talking about the breaking down of silos.

Marketing needs to talk to sales who needs to talk to product who needs to talk to support, etc., etc.

All of that is true but unfortunately, we still aren’t there.

Sales still aren’t using marketing content and marketing still isn’t focused on driving SQLs. There is still separation and to be honest, for most companies, that might be the case for a very long time.

4. Check the Chat Logs

Along with talking to your support team, take a look at chat logs.

Tools like Olark, Drift, and Livechat keep logs of the conversations happening. If you don’t have direct access to the chat platform, ask your support team to include you on reports. Even a once-a-month review could yield valuable results.

5. Scrub Your Site Search

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, site search is one of the most underutilized functionalities in Google Analytics.

Think about it. Site search allows us to see exactly what our users are looking for. It shows us what information they want and more importantly, what information they can’t find.

6. Send Out a Survey

I love taking surveys.

They make me feel like my voice is being heard, that the company cares, and if I’m being completely honest, I’m always pretty sure they are going to reach out and give me a special thank you for filling it out (spoiler alert: that hasn’t happened).

Now, I know everyone doesn’t love them as much as me and the average response rate is ~33%, but surveys can be a great way for companies to get feedback from their customers and thanks to all the new technology, they can be done in any number of ways:

Pop-Up Surveys 

Tools like Qualaroo let you put a survey directly on your site. Even better, they let you decide when the survey should appear (e.g., when a person is about to exit).

If you are running an on-site survey, remember to keep it simple and succinct and make sure you know what you want to get out of it before you start.

Email Surveys

JetBlue does a great job with this. Post-flight, you get a simple email-based survey asking about your flight and ensuring went well.

I can also attest to the fact if you report a poor experience, they will reach out to determine what went wrong.

Post-Call Survey

If you’ve ever spent any time on the phone with a cable or credit card company, you’ve probably heard the “please stay on the line for a survey.”

Personally, these are my least favorite but they can help ensure your customer support team is doing a good job and your customers are happy.

Facebook Messenger

Not too long ago, SurveyMonkey rolled out its Facebook Messenger integration, allowing you to run surveys within Messenger.

This is actually really cool (if you aren’t spamming people) and the example of soliciting real-time feedback at events is a great use case.

There are certainly other methods of surveying but if you are looking to get started, these are solid places to start.

7. Use Abandoned Cart Emails

They clicked on your ad, they spent time looking at products, they even went so far as to put the item in the cart and begin the checkout process. And then they left.

What. Just. Happened?

Abandoned cart emails are a great way to get people back into the buying process but they are also a great way to generate feedback.

For example, let’s say a person abandons their cart. This will usually trigger one or two follow-up emails reminding them of their purchase and perhaps offering a discount. Why not use your final email to understand why they left?

Include a short poll or one question survey asking why they abandoned their purchase. Perhaps it had to do with shipping costs or maybe they just weren’t ready to buy.

Those two things are very different and how we respond to them should be different.

If someone simply isn’t ready to buy, they could be put into a retargeting list. If shipping was the issue, we can include them in a free shipping sale.

Getting feedback often means being creative but it also means using what you have. 

Monitor Social Media

Have you ever used social media for keyword research? If not, you should.

Social is an amazing place to see real feedback from real customers and learn:

• How people talk about your brand.
• How they describe your products.
• How they describe your competitors’ products.

Aggregate Reviews

Reviews are content gold.

Whether they are good or bad, they give you actual feedback on the customer experience and they can help you figure out what to market.

For example, if you are a bed and breakfast and all of the reviews talk about how lovely the wood fire smells, consider adding that to your marketing materials. If you are a tax attorney and the reviews note how you didn’t waste people’s time, focus your marketing on efficiency and cost savings.

8. Ask Feedback Right After Purchase

If you want to get feedback about the purchase experience on your site, you have the best chances probably right after the purchase. Displaying a popup after finalizing the purchase can be really effective.

Look at the example below. It offers 20% off the next order in exchange for the feedback. The discount will not only convince customers to answer your questions but also helps to make them repeat customers.

9. Use Hotjar like Software

Hotjar is a robust software in tracking and understanding your user behavior and feedback. It gives you numerous benefits in improving your user experience to help you make your strategies more effective and prepare to execute changes as they occur. Here are some of the main benefits you’ll get in using Hotjar:

Visualize user behavior

Hotjar’s Heatmaps shows how your visitors interact with your site visually. You can see what they click, tap and scroll to help you determine what they want based on the indicators of their motivation and desire in visiting your site. Moreover, you can monitor what your visitors are seeing as you can record their activity and behavior on your site. This eliminates guesswork and gives you more insight into what they are doing. It also helps you identify if there are usability issues in your site to fix them immediately as they can affect the user experience negatively.

Analyze crucial user insights

Hotjar goes beyond showing you which areas in your site show heavy traffic and interaction. It also helps you see and test which page and step is a customer dropping off. This is crucial to improve and maximize your conversion funnels to its fullest potential. Hotjar also identifies problematic fields on your online form. Recognizing the fields where users take too long to fill, are left blank and even abandon your form enables you to fix them to boost your completion rates.

Listen to the user’s voice

Hotjar helps you listen to what your users have to say by providing a platform where they can voice out their thoughts. Polls enable you to collect feedback directly from your site visitors using questions that target specific visitors on your desktop and mobile site. It offers a wide array of question types, including NPS (Net Promoter Score), that you can present visually.

Surveys are also available for gathering responses in real-time that you can circulate through emails, web links or visitor invitations before they leave your site. An easy editor is available for you to build and customize your own responsive, cross-device surveys. Furthermore, users can leave instant visual feedback with context on your app and website. For example, they can leave reactions on whether they hate or like a specific tagline on your site.

Enlist test users

User research and testing are crucial to building the right strategies for your site. Hotjar lets you recruit participants from your own audiences right on your website. For instance, you can add a widget that you can customize based on your own criteria asking for help to improve your site. In exchange for the participant’s profiling information and contact details, you can give them a voucher or gift. This makes your visitors feel like their voices matter to you and improve your relationship with them by incentivizing their feedback.

Credit-SEO Journal, Hotjar, Optimink